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Monday, February 11, 2013

President’s Men- all-male look

All the President’s Men: Obama’s cabinet has an all-male look

New York: President Barack Obama’s
boring, all-male, all-white appointments for top jobs in his second-term
cabinet has Americans in an uproar. Where are the women? asked the US
media searchingly, while pointing out that for the first time in
decades, there will be no woman serving in any of the top four national
security slots — secretary of state, CIA director, secretary of defense,
or even national security adviser.
The title of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s 1974 book, All the President’s Men, is now being used derisively in America to describe Obama’s classic white male cabinet.

Obama’s mostly white male cabinet lacks diversity. Wikimedia Commons.

After the departure of Hillary Clinton, the sole women allowed into
the clubhouse, Obama has populated the top ranks of the national
security and foreign policy establishment with white men. Clinton, who
was secretary of state until last week, worked hard to transform US
diplomacy on the nuts-and-coffee level and her signature initiative as
America’s top diplomat was the administration’s “pivot to Asia.” It was
Clinton who persuaded a jittery Obama to carry out the Abbottabad strike
to kill Osama bin Laden, according to Wall Street Journal reporter
Richard Miniter’s book, “Leading From Behind.”
With Clinton retired, other than UN Ambassador Susan Rice, there will
be no woman close to Obama’s ear to weigh in on foreign and defense
matters.
“In his cabinet choice so far, President Obama has even managed to
take a step backwards from his first term,” Rosa Brooks, a senior fellow
at the New America Foundation, said in a column in Foreign Policy.
“For defense secretary, he inexplicably selected former Republican
Senator Chuck Hagel over Michèle Flournoy, the universally respected
former undersecretary of defense for policy,” wrote Brooks, who once
served as a counselor to Flournoy in the Defense Department.
“President Obama missed a historic opportunity to be the president
who appoints the first female secretary of defense,” she added.
Brooks told The New York Times that Obama had “surrounded
himself by mostly male advisers and has shown no particular interest in
focusing on making the White House a more friendly workplace for women.”